And then there is the younger set, the city kids, the farm a mere summertime interlude in their urban lives. They choose city names for themselves: Edwin becomes Ned (or sometimes Ted), Asia becomes Sidney, and Johnny is known as Wilkes. These three have become the beating heart of the family. They quarrel and criticize, ridicule and betray each other. Still they are each other’s whole childhood, a tightly laced, insular group. “We only had each other,” Edwin will say in later years. “We could only be comfortable with each other,” is Asia’s version of the same.

Mother may have been forced off the farm by the Mitchells, but she’s landed somewhere she likes better. She misses Ann, but has an Irish servant now who comes to cook and clean, as well as a free black woman who helps Rosalie with the laundry.

For the younger children, Mother sees possibilities. They go to school. They take dancing and music lessons. They wear better clothes, which Mother makes herself. She aspires to the middle-class respectability she herself had as a child. She sets about finding and nurturing useful social connections that have nothing to do with the world of the theater.

Father remains a barrier to this. To see a play may be completely respectable. But to act in one remains suspect, actresses in particular merely a rank or two above prostitutes. Once Father’s genius was enough to overcome society’s disdain. But now his mad freaks are more famous than his brilliant performances.

Other children, on the streets and in the schoolyards, ask about him: Did he once climb a tree naked and crow from the branches like a rooster? Had he tried to raise a pony from the dead? A child? Did he keep a murderer’s skull in his trunk and bring it out whenever he played Hamlet? Had he, as Richard III, refused to die at the end of the play, forcing the scene to go on and on until the audience gave up and went home? Had he shot a man in the face? Jumped from a boat? Held a funeral for a pigeon? Were other actors afraid to take the stage with him? Did he not believe in God?

Some of these stories are true, some are not. All are news to the younger set. Their father’s genius is the fixed point around which the family revolves. It seems impossible that people who don’t even know Father would know more about him than his own children. They deny it all, and they believe their own denials, turning to each other for support in this belief. They are cut by the gossip nevertheless.